Covenant With Abraham Quotes

Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

To see the miraculous in the ordinary is a more precious gift than prophecy.

We don’t have children to fulfill our dreams. Children allow us to let go of the dreams we were never meant to fulfill.

I have been bent and broken but I hope into better shape.

Secrecy lives in the same rooms as loneliness.

In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

A dog lives for you. A cat just lives with you.

Roses would be annoying weeds if the blooms never withered and died. Beauty resides in the knowledge that it doesn’t last.

To be listened to is healing,

Success is not money! Success is you are fully loving what you are doing. That only is success!

Philipose quotes Gandhi: “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of food.

The voyage of discovery is not about new lands, but having new eyes.

But such memories are woven from gossamer threads; time eats holes in the fabric, and these she must darn with myth and fable.

Sooner or later, she must sit down to the meal of consequences

All water is connected and only land and people are discontinuous. And his land is a place where he can no longer stay.

You can’t walk across a lake just because you change its name to “land.” Labels matter.

The water she first stepped into minutes ago is long gone and yet it is here, past and present and future inexorably coupled, like time made incarnate. This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone.

Child, the past is past, and furthermore it’s different every time I remember it.

when it’s all done, when life is almost over, what do you want to remember?

the sweetness of life is sure in only two things: love and sugar. If you don’t get enough of the first, have more of the second!

The minutes we spend watching the waves don’t count against our life spans,

sometimes we have to “live the question,” not push for the answer.

there’s no going back; time and water move on relentlessly.

Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time I’ve lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school.

Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time I’ve lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school. Ahab, Queequeg, Ophelia, and other characters die on the page so that we might live better lives.

Mariamma, sometimes when you are most afraid, when you feel most helpless, that is when God is pointing out a path for you.

A chasm separates that memory from this moment.

Whatever is next for me, whatever the story of my life, the roots that must nourish it are here.

Koshy Saar’s response is indignant. “It’s fiction! Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

Even before his brain digests these sights, his body—skin, nerve endings, lungs, heart—recognizes the geography of his birth. He never understood how much it mattered. Every bit of this lush landscape is his; its every atom contains him.

And if beauty is in the ephemeral, what about the beautiful things you can’t have? Perhaps that kind of beauty does last forever.

A daughter has an open door into a father’s heart.

A woman with unconventional beauty raises the hope that the viewer might be the only one to see it, that in recognizing and appreciating it, he alone has created her beauty.

In the Bible, when God made a covenant with Abraham, He removed Abraham from the pagan world. The pagan system was such that if you were born poor, you were poor all of your life, and if you were born rich, you were rich all of your life. However, in their covenant, God said to Abraham, “You are going to increase and prosper.” This became the blessing, the rare and dramatic change that took place in Abraham’s lifetime, making Abraham different from the pagans. The pagans did not understand prosperity. They lived from hand to mouth and knew no other way of life.

He’ll never know the bracing sensation of diving headfirst into the river, the roar of entry followed by enveloping silence. All water is connected, and her world is limitless. He stands at the limits

The chaos and hurt in God’s world are unfathomable mysteries, yet the Bible shows her that there is order beneath. As her father would say, “Faith is to know the pattern is there, even though none is visible.

Freedom is not free! The Almighty offers these gifts contingent upon our willingness to turn to Him as a nation. It is a covenant relationship. That covenant is in force today, and the rules still apply.

Faith is to know the pattern is there, even though none is visible.

Big Ammachi scans the darkened walls. Long ago this stopped being a kitchen, becoming instead sacred space, a faithful companion that cosseted her with its warm, scented embrace.

One shouldn’t just hope to be treated well: one must insist on it.

His art, so he tells himself, is to give voice to the ordinary, in memorable ways.

Apparently, Marx said that religion was the opium of the masses. It kept the oppressed from complaining or trying to change things.

In the face of God's obvious inadequacies, the pious have generally held that one cannot apply earthly norms to the Creator of the universe. This argument loses its force the moment we notice that the Creator who purports to be beyond human judgment is consistently ruled by human passions— jealousy, wrath, suspicion, and the lust to dominate. A close study of our holy books reveals that the God of Abraham is a ridiculous fellow—capricious, petulant, and cruel—and one with whom a covenant is little guarantee of health or happiness. If these are the characteristics of God, then the worst among us have been created far more in his image than we ever could have hoped.

A good story goes beyond what a forgiving God cares to do: it reconciles families and unburdens them of secrets whose bond is stronger than blood. But in their revealing, as in their keeping, secrets can tear a family apart.

For twenty-eight years of Baby Mol’s life, the sun has never failed to come up, yet every morning she’s ecstatic at its return. To see the miraculous in the ordinary is a more precious gift than prophecy.

in my day, molay, a girl couldn’t dream like that. But you, my namesake, you can be a doctor, or lawyer, or journalist—anything you imagine. We lit that lamp to light your path.

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.

God’s time isn’t the same as hers. God’s calendar isn’t the one hanging in her kitchen.

The whisky burns. How strange to try to drown pain with fire.

Life comes from God and life is precious precisely because it is brief. God’s gift is time. However much or however little one has of it, it comes from him.

I am so behind that yesterday catches up with tomorrow.

What did it matter? We are dying while we are living. We are old even when we're young. We are clinging to life even as we resign ourselves to leaving it.

In one sense, the Qur’an regards the Torah and the Gospel as older siblings— and looks on with dismay at the family feud tearing apart Abrahamic cohesion. In another sense, the Qur’an exists as an orphan. It presents the first Abrahamic scripture in Arabic, delivered by an Arabian prophet. Claiming a lineage back to the Torah yet revealed in a thoroughly pagan society, the Qur’an enjoys an insider-outsider status—one that empowers it to look lovingly yet critically at its ancestry. This complex inheritance means the Qur’an is aware of its roots yet free to develop its own identity without being confined by parental oversight.

Such precious, precious water, Lord, water from our own well; this water that is our covenant with You, with this soil, with the life You granted us. We are born and baptized in this water, we grow full of pride, we sin, we are broken, we suffer, but with water we are cleansed of our transgressions, we are forgiven, and we are born again, day after day till the end of our days. Her mat takes her weight kindly, eases

One thing I know, I love to learn. I love literature. With these books I can sail the seven seas, chase a white whale . . .

The mistake, Digby, of choosing to see more in your future mate than the evidence has already suggested.

Forgive me,” she says now. “For what?” “For everything. Sometimes we can wound each other in ways we don’t intend.

We have no practice, he thinks, of seeing our real selves. Even before a mirror we compose our faces to meet our own expectations.

What can success look like now? Janakiram has the answer. “Success is not money! Success is you are fully loving what you are doing. That only is success!

It’s fiction! Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

In a life, it is the in-betweens that are fatal;

we are merely renting these bodies of ours. You came into this world on an in breath. You will exit on an out breath. Hence, we say that someone has . . . ? ‘Expired’!

This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone. She stays there listening to the burbling mantra, the chant that never ceases, repeating its message that all is one. What she thought was her life is all maya, all illusion, but it is one shared illusion. And what else can she do but go on.

The descendants of Abraham were flattered by the opinion, that they alone were the heirs of the covenant, and they were apprehensive of diminishing the value of their inheritance, by sharing it too easily with the strangers of the earth.

This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone. She stays there listening to the burbling mantra, the chant that never ceases, repeating its message that all is one. What she thought was her life is all maya, all

Secrecy lives in the same rooms as loneliness. His secret and his failing is that after his mother's betrayal he cannot risk love.

His mother’s soul has been dead for years and her body has now followed.

dog lives for you. A cat just lives with you.

The universe is nothing but a speck of foam on a limitless ocean that is the Creator.

What did it matter? We are dying while we’re living, we are old even when we’re young, we are clinging to life even as we resign ourselves to leaving it.

worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life, and faith is the oil

What is worry but fear of what the future holds? Baby Mol lives completely in the present and is spared all worry.

The chemachen who comes calling for a subscription one morning is no more than a boy, the growth on his upper lip so sparse that each hair could be named after an apostle.

it is a reminder that the sweetness of life comes with bitterness.

You can confide in quiet people. They make way for one’s thoughts.

Literacy alters patterns of life that have gone undisturbed for generations.

The financial game is a team sport. God established a covenant with Noah after the flood, and later he established a covenant with Abraham. A covenant is an agreement between two parties. In order to prosper, you must establish what I call a “carevenant” with your family

Even if everyone knows her story, no one really knows how she feels. It pours out now: her rage, her shame, her guilt-- it still lingers. But with the telling comes a sense of empowerment. She has no culpability in the Brijee matter. None, other than being naive and being a woman. During the inquiry she had tapped into the righteousness that was her due; she slapped down the least suggestion that she might be a fault. She had learned a lesson: to show weakness, to be tearful or shattered didn't serve her. One shouldn't just hope to be treated well: one must insist on it.

Well, Koshy Saar may not believe in God, but it’s a good thing that God believes in that old man. Why else did he send him into your life?

novels, the great lies that tell the truth, the world in its most heroic and salacious forms can always

The price of deceit is to feel like a cockroach.

All water is connected, and her world is limitless. He stands at the limits of his.

This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone.

This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone. She

to be part of the fabric instead of a thread torn from the whole.

you forgave me long ago. Why would I not do the same? So, whatever it is, I forgive you.” She rises, touches his cheek, kisses him on his forehead,

I have no choice, which is the best kind of choice.

What she thought was her life is all maya, all illusion, but it is one shared illusion. And what else can she do but go on.

In this upside down world, snarls are smiles, ugly is beautiful, and the crippled outwork the able bodied, but tears are the same.

The American flag doesn't give her glory on a peaceful, calm day. It's when the winds pick up and become boisterous, do we see her strength. When she unfolds her hand, and shows her frayed fingers, where we see the stretch of red-blood lines of man that fought for this land. The purity of white stripes that strips our sins, and the stars of Abraham's covenant, broad in a midnight blue sky. The rights our forefathers established. As it waves high in the currents of freedom, where the Torch of Liberty shines over the sea, does she give meaning to unity. When we strive as one nation, or when it drops half-mast, to a fallen soldier.

Every tree had its own personality. Their sense of time is different. We think they’re mute, but it’s just that it takes them days to complete a word. You know, Mariamma, in the jungle I understood my failing, my human limitation. It is to be consumed by one fixed idea. Then another. And another. Like walking the straight line. Wanting to be a priest. Then a Naxalite. But in nature, one fixed idea is unnatural. Or rather, the one idea, the only idea is life itself. Just being. Living.

But God’s time isn’t the same as hers. God’s calendar isn’t the one hanging in her kitchen. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. It’s pointless chastising herself for not rescuing her mother sooner. Happened is happened, she thinks. The past is unreliable, and only the future is certain, and she must look to it with faith that the pattern will be revealed.

In a dizzying shift of perspective, Rune suddenly feels he has become the leper: it’s Rune who looks out through scarred, opaque corneas; Rune who sees cloudy, smeared images with no edges; Rune who discerns light and shadow but remembers what it was like to have moonlight fall on his face; those are Rune’s misshapen, ulcerated feet wrapped in bloodied gunnysack that is secured with coir rope . . . The moment passes. He has no explanation for what just happened, the sense of being momentarily embodied in another.

During the inquiry she had tapped into the righteousness that was her due. She slapped down the least suggestion that she might be at fault. She had learned a lesson. To show weakness. To be tearful or shattered didn't serve her. One shouldn't just hope to be treated well, one must insist on it.

When her fingers curled to her palm, her husband chased her out before she could say goodbye to her children. She cackles at this memory, a solitary tooth flashing in her mouth like a lone tree in a cemetery. Sankar joins in. Rune puzzles over their strange laughter. The mind must get scarred from being rejected in this manner. These two have died to their loved ones and to society, and that wound is greater than the collapsing nose, the hideous face, or the loss of fingers. Leprosy deadens the nerves and is therefore painless; the real wound of leprosy, and the only pain they feel, is that of exile.

Jesus is the true and better Adam, who passed the test in the garden and whose obedience is imputed to us (1 Corinthians 15). Jesus is the true and better Abel, who, though innocently slain, has blood that cries out for our acquittal, not our condemnation (Hebrews 12:24). Jesus is the true and better Abraham, who answered the call of God to leave the comfortable and familiar and go out into the void “not knowing whither he went” to create a new people of God. Jesus is the true and better Isaac, who was not just offered up by his father on the mount but was truly sacrificed for us all. God said to Abraham, “Now I know you love me, because you did not withhold your son, your only son whom you love, from me.” Now we can say to God, “Now we know that you love us, because you did not withhold your son, your only son whom you love, from us.” Jesus is the true and better Jacob, who wrestled with God and took the blow of justice we deserved so that we, like Jacob, receive only the wounds of grace to wake us up and discipline us. Jesus is the true and better Joseph, who at the right hand of the King forgives those who betrayed and sold him and uses his new power to save them. Jesus is the true and better Moses, who stands in the gap between the people and the Lord and who mediates a new covenant (Hebrews 3). Jesus is the true and better rock of Moses, who, struck with the rod of God’s justice, now gives us water in the desert. Jesus is the true and better Job—the truly innocent sufferer—who then intercedes for and saves his stupid friends (Job 42). Jesus is the true and better David, whose victory becomes his people’s victory, though they never lifted a stone to accomplish it themselves. Jesus is the true and better Esther, who didn’t just risk losing an earthly palace but lost the ultimate heavenly one, who didn’t just risk his life but gave his life—to save his people. Jesus is the true and better Jonah, who was cast out into the storm so we could be brought in.

He thinks of his loving sister, and the narrow, confined life she lived that never seemed that way to her, and how much she enriched their lives. He was her “precious baby,” never aging for her, just as she never aged. Strangers might feel sorry for Baby Mol, but if they’d understood how happy she was, how fully she lived in the present, inhabiting each second, they’d have been envious.

By such subtle signs, like an orchestra tuning up, the daily event that is central to life on the Coromandel Coast announces itself: the evening breeze. The Madras evening breeze has a body to it, its atomic constituents knitted together to create a thing of substance that strokes and cools the skin in the manner of a long, icy drink or a plunge into a mountain spring. It pushes through on a broad front, up and down the coast; unhurried, reliable, with no slack until after midnight, by which time it will have lulled them into beautiful sleep. It doesn’t know caste or privilege as it soothes the expatriates in their pocket mansions, the shirtless clerk sitting with his wife on the rooftop of his one-room house, and the pavement dwellers in their roadside squats. Digby has seen the cheery Muthu become distracted, his conversation clipped and morose, as he waits for the relief that comes from the direction of Sumatra and Malaya, gathering itself over the Bay of Bengal, carrying scents of orchids and salt, an airborne opiate that unclenches, unknots, and finally lets one forget the brutal heat of the day. “Yes, yes, you are having your Taj Mahal, your Golden Temple, your Eiffel Tower,” an educated Madrasi will say, “but can anything match our Madras evening breeze?

Why does God not declare himself as the God of Adam? For we know that Abraham sinned even as Adam did. Why then did He not call himself the God of Adam? Why did He not say the God of Abel, the seed of Adam? Why instead did He call himself the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob? Why according to the flesh was our Lord Jesus presented in the New Testament as having been born of the seed of Abraham? Why from among all men should God have called himself the God of these three particular persons? Wherein lies the difference between these three and other people? Well, apart from the fact that God had covenanted with these three men, He takes them up as representative personages. He chooses them to represent three types of men in the world. What type of man is Abraham? He is a giant of faith. He is rather uncommon; in fact, he is quite special. As the God of Abraham, God declares himself to be the God of excellent people. Yet, thanks be to God, He is not only the God of the excellent. Were He merely this kind of God, we would sink into despair because we are not persons of excellence. But God is also the God of Isaac. What type of person is Isaac? He is very ordinary. He eats whenever he can, and sleeps as he has opportunity. He is neither a wonder man nor a wicked person. How this fact has comforted many of us! Yet God is not only the God of the ordinary men, He is also the God of the bad men: He is the God of Jacob too, for in the Scriptures Jacob is pictured as one of the worst persons to be found in the Old Testament. Hence through these three persons, God is telling us that He is the God of Abraham the best, the God of Isaac the ordinary, and the God of Jacob the worst. He is the God of those with great faith, He is the God of the common people, and He is also the God of the lowest of men such as thieves and prostitutes. Suppose I am special like Abraham; then He is my God. Suppose I am ordinary like Isaac; then He is also my God. And suppose from my mother’s womb I have been bad like Jacob was in that I have striven with my brother; then He is still my God. He has a way with the excellent, with the common, and with the worst of humanity.

. . He feels himself disappear in the capaciousness of the universe. He has become the sagging net, the blind leper who must sleep under the stars . . . In the immensity of the cosmos, Rune feels he himself is nothing, an illusion. The difference between him and the leper is no difference at all, they are just manifestations of the universal consciousness. In this new awareness, the restless chattering in his head abruptly ceases. Just as the ocean manifests as a wave or surf, but neither wave nor surf is the ocean, so also the Creator—God or Brahma—generates an impression of a universe that takes the form of a Swedish doctor, or a blind leper. Rune is real. The leper is real. The fishing net is real. Yet it is all maya, their separateness an illusion. All is one. The universe is nothing but a speck of foam on a limitless ocean that is the Creator. He feels euphoric and unburdened—the peace of God, which passeth all understanding.